The Great Terror

The accused were all leading members of the group around Tukhachevsky which had pioneered military rethinking through the 1930s. They had developed the ideas and to some degree the organization of an efficient, modern army.

The military leaders were still young men. They had been commanding Armies while still in their twenties. Apart from Kork, who was just fifty, those now seized were all in their forties. Even now, Tukhachevsky and Putna were forty-four; Yakir and Uborevich, only forty-one—the same age as Zhukov, who was to play an important military and political role for many years to come. Gamarnik, too, was only forty-three.

Tukhachevsky had by general recognition the finest military brain in the Army, and the strongest powers of will and nerve. He came of the minor aristocracy. During the First World War, he had served as a subaltern in the Semeonovsky Guards Regiment. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans in 1915. After five attempts to escape, he was lodged in the security fortress of Ingolstadt, the Colditz of the First World War (where his fellow inmates include young Captain de Gaulle). In 1917, he got back to Russia, where he joined the Bolsheviks. “Brilliant, quick of mind, with a streak of cruelty allied to an impetuousness which bordered on the rash, the young Red Army Commander cultivated a certain hauteur and an arrogance which was not calculated to ease all his friendships.”³

He was twenty-seven when, in 1920, he commanded the Armies attacking Poland, having several times saved the Communists on the Eastern Front. He later commanded at Kronstadt and against the Antonov rebellion in the Tambov region.

The Kiev and Byelorussian Military Districts, under Yakir and Uborevich, respectively, were the two largest, containing between them twenty-five of the ninety rifle divisions and twelve of the twenty-six cavalry divisions.

Yakir, brisk and young in appearance and activity, was the son of a small Jewish chemist in Kishinev. He had organized a Bolshevik band in the Ukraine when only twenty-one, and had risen within three years to command the so-called Fastov army groups against the Poles. From 1926, he had commanded the key Ukrainian Military District, under its various successive names. He was the only professional soldier who was a full member of the Central Committee.fn1

Uborevich, a bespectacled military intellectual, had also commanded an Army against the Poles in 1920, and had then figured in the brilliant operations which finally led to the storming of the Crimea at the end of 1920 and put an end to the Civil War. He was a candidate member of the Central Committee, the only Army one besides four Marshals fn2 and Gamarnik’s Assistant Head of the Political Administration, A. S. Bulin.

The other accused were almost equally distinguished. Kork and Eideman, too, had commanded Armies in the Civil and Polish wars. Eideman, a square-headed, mustached, sergeant-major-looking type, was in fact a Latvian writer. Putna, who had served with Tukhachevsky in the Semeonovsky Guards before the Revolution, had had lesser commands, but had held major posts in the training side of the Army in the 1920s. Feldman, of Jewish origin, was one of Tukhachevsky’s closest associates.

The other main victim of Stalin’s blow, Yan Gamarnik, Head of the Army Political Administration and First Deputy People’s Commissar for War, was not in quite the same category. He had been engaged in controversies against the military leaders on matters of political–military organization. A typical Old Bolshevik, he had fought in very dangerous circumstances in the Ukraine in the Civil War, and had voted with the Sapronov faction at the time of its influence in the Republic.⁴ But he had had no connection with the oppositionists since the mid-1920s. He had been appointed Head of the Political Administration of the Red Army in 1929. With his long, rough beard and resemblance to Dostoyevsky, he was thought of—in the Party context, it is true—as a sort of saint.

Far from their fine records being of any service to the generals, the contrary seems to apply. In 1937, one-fifth of the officer corps were still veterans of the Civil War; this included almost all the High Command. But there were many grudges outstanding from those earlier times. During the battles for Tsaritsyn, a group had formed around Voroshilov and Stalin which continually disobeyed and stood out against the orders of Trotsky as Commissar for War. A long, bloody-minded intrigue, in which Voroshilov in particular behaved extremely badly, caused perhaps the worst ill-feeling to be found even among the freely quarreling Bolshevik leadership.